Next to the Beatles Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Freewheelin is arguably the most important singer songwriter album ever to be recorded. Released five years before Sgt Pepper without Freewheelin it is doubtful that the great album would have existed. As John Lennon once said in discussing the album which reached the Beatles in their Paris hotel fully a year after its release," for the rest of our three weeks in Paris, we didn't stop playing it." Before Freewheelin there was Twist and Shout and Can’t Buy Me Love after Freewheelin there was Norweign Wood, Nowhere Man and Day in the Life. The album’s greatness has been recognized by more than the Beatles, Howard Sounes calls it Dylan’s first great album and in 2002 it was included by the Library of Congress as one of 50 recordings to be added to the National Recording Registryin 2002. Try imagining the 1960s without Blowin in the Wind and Hard Rain’s Going to Fall.
But it was produced when Dylan was just 22. Some comparisons are in order, Orson Welles was 25 when he made “Citizen Kane,” Mozart was 21 when he composed Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one an Keats was just 24 when he composed Ode to a Nightingale. But contrary to the usual narrative surrounding early genius Dylan’s talent did not just burns brightly and like so many of his contemporaries just fade away it has kept going over the last 50 years with stops and restarts along the way. On this 50th anniversary of the record’s production we can start to examine the album for clues as to Dylan’s peculiar kind of genius to both astonish his contemporaries and remake himself time and time again.
Recorded between April 24,1962 and May 27, 1963, it was a key turning point for many in solidifying the consciousness of the sixties generation. A generation that had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of universal destruction the impression is of a man in a hurry who may not have much time to leave his mark. The albums’ intensity lightened in a few places by some witty if slight songs was new to popular music as were the vivid flashes of poetic language that made you realize that here was a lyrical talent on fire who had absorbed major influences of his time, mostly obviously the apocalypitc poetry of Alan Ginsburg, the social realism of Woody Guthrie and the romantic English folk ballad among many others. The voice revealed only a slight Guthrie folk singer timbre but sounded unafraid and strong even mocking even when dealing with such grim subject matter as the end of the world.
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